Who is Akanksha, 34, running for UN secretary-general?
INDIAN-ORIGIN WOMAN ENTERS RACE FOR POST OF WORLD’S TOP DIPLOMAT
Never mind that Arora Akanksha has worked at the United Nations for only about four years, as an auditor recruited from an accounting firm. Put aside that at age 34, she has no diplomatic experience.
And forget that she is less than half as old as the incumbent she wants to replace, secretary-general Antonio Guterres, 71, the veteran Portuguese statesman and former UN high commissioner for refugees.
Arora said that as a grandchild of people who were once refugees, she was acutely aware of difficult odds.
But with a $30,000 campaign budget drawn largely from her savings, a website and a social media promotion that begins with, “People in my profession aren’t supposed to stand up to the ones in charge,” Arora has declared herself a candidate to be the next leader of the United Nations.
On February 17, Arora, a native of India and citizen of Canada, submitted a formal letter of application for the 2022-27 term. “We are not living up to our purpose or our promise,” the letter stated. “We are failing those we are here to serve.”
Arora comes from a refugee family background. Asked about the possibility of losing to UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, she said, ‘Refugees have no plan B, hence I have no plan B.’
Unlikely candidacy
No country has yet formally endorsed her unlikely candidacy. But if nothing else, Arora’s boldness has touched a nerve at the 193-member organisation and thrown attention on the historically opaque way that its leader is picked.
Arora’s message, she said, is that the United Nations is sclerotic, wasteful, adrift, paternalistic and patronising toward many of the younger members of its staff of 44,000 people around the world.
According to one of her campaign videos on YouTube, only about 29 cents of every dollar, from the UN’s total annual revenue of roughly $56 billion, goes to actual causes.
“We spend our resources on holding conferences, writing reports,” Arora, an audit coordinator for the UN Development Programme, said in an interview.
“She’s fearless,” said Pauline Pamela Pratt, a colleague at the UN Population Fund who worked with Arora in 2019. “She’s not afraid to be who she is, even among people who have authority over her.”
“I’m sure she has no chance and equally sure that she knows that,” said Edward Mortimer, a former UN official. “It’s a brave way of demonstrating unhappiness, which I’ve no doubt is quite widely shared by her colleagues.”
Arora, who has taken a leave of absence from work for her campaign, said she had received many positive messages and more than 2,600 votes on her website, and she is hoping to make her case to UN ambassadors in the next few months.
“This is not even a place that challenges, because they go through countries politically and negotiate,” Arora said. “So yeah, this is a straight-on challenge, and I don’t want to play games or anything; I just want to run an honest campaign.”
Not widely known outside her workplace, Arora has committed a number of head-turning firsts.
She is the first person known to officially challenge an incumbent seeking a second term and the first millennial-generation candidate. And if she prevailed, Arora would be the first woman to lead the United Nations — a precedent nearly achieved in 2016 when seven prominent women were in the running with Guterres.
Family background
As for why she aspired to lead the United Nations, Arora traced the reasons partly to her own refugee family background, to a Manhattan taxi accident that sent her to the hospital, and to her memory of a malnourished child in Uganda.
Like many Hindus, her grandparents fled from Pakistan to India after the 1947 partition, a fact that colours her outlook on the world. Asked about the possibility of losing to Guterres, she said, “Refugees have no plan B, hence I have no plan B.”
Arora was born in the state of Haryana and spent her youngest years in Saudi Arabia, where her parents, both doctors, had relocated. From age nine to 18 she was back in India attending boarding school, she said, and then decided to move to Canada, where she graduated from York University with honours and worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada as an auditing manager.
Hired in December 2016 by the United Nations to help improve its internal financial controls, Arora said her admiration for the organisation soon turned to shock.
“The system is so amazing on the outside, but there’s no coherence for getting things done,” she said.
While Arora has not received explicit endorsements from powerful UN figures, neither has she been discouraged. Mary Robinson, a former high commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Ireland who was once considered a contender for secretary-general, said, she welcomed Arora’s candidacy as “entirely healthy.”